Release 3.0

The ThoughtSpot 3.0 release includes features focused around new chart types (including geo), supportability, and user experience improvements.

What’s New in this Release?

Geo Visualizations

You can now visualize geographical data with ThoughtSpot. There are three new Geo charts that show data on a map by location.

Geo Area for country, state, or longitude/latitude:

Figure 1: Geo Area map

Geo Bubble for country, state, longitude/latitude, or zip code:

Figure 2: Geo Bubble map

Geo Heatmap for country, state, longitude/latitude, or zip code:

Figure 3: Geo Heatmap

For more information, see the ThoughtSpot Administrator Guide.

New Charts

There are five new chart types in this release in addition to the Geo visualizations:

Waterfall for visualizing positive and negative growth.

Figure 4: Waterfall chart

Treemap, which uses color and size to represent two data values.

Figure 5: Treemap chart

Heatmap, which uses color to represent data values.

Figure 6: Heatmap chart

Pie in Pie, which shows concentric two pie charts comparing different measures. To see this, assign two different measures to the Y-axis in the chart configuration tool.

Figure 7: Creating a Pie in Pie chart

Figure 8: Pie in Pie chart

Stacked Area Chart, which shows the relative contribution to the accumulated total of a measure over time.

Figure 9: Stacked Area Chart

Email Notification

Users now receive an email notification whenever another user shares a pinboard or answer with them. The email includes a with a link to the shared answer or pinboard.

User profiles now include an email address. If you have LDAP enabled for ThoughtSpot, the email will be pulled from LDAP. Otherwise, administrators or users can enter email addresses manually.

Figure 10: Set the user email

ODBC/JDBC Driver Certification

The ODBC and JDBC drivers have been certified. The drivers have been tested with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Informatica PowerCenter.

Informatica Connector

ThoughtSpot now has its own Informatica Connector for simplified data transfer for companies that use Informatica. You can access it from within the Informatica Marketplace.

Figure 11: Informatica Marketplace

Add Descriptions

You can now add descriptions to various objects in ThoughtSpot. This lets you provide more detailed information beyond the title or column header. Use descriptions to explain where the data comes from, how people can use it, or what insights you can get from a chart, for example.

Whenever someone hovers over the object’s title, the description will appear. Objects that can have descriptions are:

Tables or charts:

​

Figure 12: Adding a description to a chart

Columns:

​

Figure 13: Column showing a description

Pinboards:

​

Figure 14: Pinboard showing a description

SAML Support

ThoughtSpot now supports SAML authentication for SiteMinder. Please contact ThoughtSpot Support for help with implementing SAML.

Multiple Column Joins

When creating joins for Query on Query, you can now join tables on multiple columns. In the past, you were limited to only one column.

UX Improvements

Chart Selector

There is a new chart selector that’s more visual and easier to use.

Figure 15: The chart selector

Chart Colors

Charts are now more beautiful, because they use more vivid color palettes, which are chosen to best illustrate the data you are visualizing. Oooh. Aaah.

Figure 16: New Chart Colors

Change Chart Colors

You can now change the colors used in the legend for a chart. To do so, click on the square next to the attribute whose color you wish to change.

Figure 17: Change chart colors

Disabled Charts Hints

If your data doesn’t match a particular chart type, its name appears as greyed out in the chart selector. You can hover over it to see what’s required to get that chart type to display.

Figure 18: Unavailable chart hint

Top and Bottom Searches

In the past, “top” and “bottom” searches required a more exact keyword syntax. This has been relaxed to make these searches easier. Both default to 10, if you don’t specify a number to use.

For example, where before you would type:

top 10 customer name ranked by sales

Now you can get the same result by typing any of these:

top customer name by sales

customer name sales top 10

customer name top 10 sales

Lightweight backup

In addition to the full cluster backup, a lightweight backup is now available. This lightweight backup includes system metadata, user imported data, and objects created by users through the Web interface (answers, worksheets, formulas, users, groups, and pinboards). It backs up everything except for the data loaded through tsload. For disaster recovery, you can use the last lightweight backup to restore the cluster, and then re-load the data using the same scripts you used to load it originally. The lightweight backup runs faster and takes up less disk space than the full backup.

LDAP Testing

There is a new command to test that an LDAP configuration is working properly. This example shows the usage:

Collect cluster logs

There is a new method for collecting logs, which provides more complete and targeted log bundles. The command is tscli logs collect. Details are available in the ThoughtSpot Administrator Guide.

Within the ThoughtSpot application, you can download trace logs related to a specific incident by clicking on “What Happened?” and selecting “Download Trace”.

Figure 19: Download trace log

Custom Support Contact

You can now indicate a support contact (email and phone number) at your organization for first level technical support. That person can answer questions about data and searching, and submit any system and software-related questions to ThoughtSpot Support.

You designate the contact using these tscli commands:

For email address:

$ tscli support set-admin-email <email_address/>

For phone number:

$ tscli support set-admin-phone <phone_number/>

The Support contact information in the Help Center uses the custom email and phone number:

Figure 20: Help Center with custom support contact

The instructions for emailing log bundles when an error occurs will include the email for the custom support contact.

Synonyms for Worksheet Columns

You can now add synonyms for worksheet columns. Previously, you could only set synonyms for columns in the underlying tables.

If you want to allow searching in worksheets using more than one name for a column, you can create synonyms for it. This is helpful when different departments refer to the data using different terminology, for example. Using synonyms allows them to access the data even if the term they choose isn't the same as the actual column name.

What’s Changed in this Release?

Syntax for Contains, Begins With, and Ends With

We have changed the syntax for begins with, contains, and ends with searches. Now the argument after these keyword(s) that has to be enclosed in quotes (double or single quotes).

Old saved answers will continue to work, quotes will magically appear around those tokens once they are reopened and sage bar is edited.

Cluster Logs

The method for gathering logs from the cluster has changed. If you have created any scripts that use the older “tscli cluster logs” command syntax, you must modify them to use the new syntax. The new method is faster and returns all the logs from the different components. Because the logs returned are more complete, they are somewhat larger than in the past.

The syntax for gathering logs has changed from "tscli cluster logs" to "tscli logs collect". The flags have changed as well. To see the new usage, issue:

$ tscli logs collect -h
usage: tscli logs collect [-h] --include INCLUDE [--exclude EXCLUDE]
[--since SINCE] [--from FROM] [--to TO] [--out OUT]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--include INCLUDE Comma separated list of logs to include, each entry is either a "selector" or a glob for matching files.
Selectors must be among: orion, system, ts. Anything starting with / is assumed to be a glob pattern and interpreted via find(1). Other entries are ignored.
--exclude EXCLUDE Comma separated list of logs to exclude. Applies to the list selected by --include. Params are interpreted just like in --include
--since SINCE Grab logs from this time window in the past. Should be a human readable duration string, e.g. 4h (4 hours), 30m (30 minutes), 1d (1 day).
--from FROM Timestamp where collection begins, must be of the form: yyyymmdd-HH:MM
--to TO Timestamp where collection ends, must be of the form: yyyymmdd-HH:MM
--out OUT Location where log tarball is written

What’s Fixed in this Release?

FIXED: Maintain order of CSVs

ISSUE ID: SCAL-7387

In previous releases, table columns maintained their original order when downloaded as CSVs. In 3.0, when the columns in a table are reorganized, the changes also occur in the export.

FIXED: Legend in downloaded chart

ISSUE ID: SCAL-8027

Downloaded charts now include the chart legend.

FIXED: Filter on high cardinality columns

ISSUE ID: SCAL-8404

Previously, filters on high cardinality columns were limited to the first fifteen thousand unique attributes. This release has removed that limit.

FIXED: Date format improvement in TQL

ISSUE ID: SCAL-7716

When using TQL to check values in a table, dates used to display in epoch format. Now date TQL SELECT statements return dates in the more human-readable format YYYY-MM-DD and YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.

FIXED: ODBC driver loads faster

ISSUE ID: SCAL-8416

The ODBC driver now supports parallel loading.

Known Issues

Stacked area chart legend details are incorrect

ISSUE ID: SCAL-9615

Description: When hovering over a stacked area chart, the information given in the details popup is inaccurate. For example, instead of showing the actual numeric value and the percentage of the whole, an incorrect percentage is shown.

*NOTICE: This issue has been fixed in release 3.0.1. Contact ThoughtSpot Support to upgrade to the latest 3.0.x release.

Supported Upgrade Paths

If you are running a release that begins with one of the following ThoughtSpot version numbers, you can upgrade to this release directly: